Hit by the leftie sledgehammer - Avatar

Miranda Devine in The Sydney Morning Herald: But, for all its technological brilliance and the talent that went into the creation of Pandora and the Na'vi characters, the movie ruins itself with Cameron's sanctimonious hippie sensibility. It is impossible to watch Avatar without being banged over the head with the director's ideological hammer. About the time the baddest bad guy - a US marine, of course - launches an unconscionable attack on the Na'vi with the words "Shock and awe", "pre-emptive war" and "fighting terror with terror", you realise you've been had. The snarling vipers of left-wing Hollywood have been let off the leash in a way previously unmatched in a high-priced blockbuster. In fact Avatar is reputed to be the most expensive movie ever made, with a budget of $US500 million. Cameron has a simple formula: Humans bad. Planet (Gaia) good. Noble savages good. Flaky pagan worship good. America bad. American military very bad. Capitalism bad. Mining bad. Raping planet. The only good soldier is a traitor. Oh dear, the myth of the Noble Savage refuses to die! We all like to be Zen with the world. And Cameron has tapped into the religious impulse hardwired in his audience in the same way airport bookshops abound with New Age bestsellers such as The Secret. But he defeats the purpose by indulging in the rancid partisanship that characterised the anti-Bush/anti-Howard left of the last decade. The pity is Avatar's in-your-face preaching only serves to annoy people, who will soon shrug off Cameron's accomplishments and forget whatever it was he was trying to say. By contrast, District 9, a comparatively low budget ($US30 million) movie produced by The Lord of the Rings's Peter Jackson, which explores similar themes, haunts the viewer. Aliens arrive in Johannesburg, are locked in camps and are treated appallingly. The movie plumbs the worst of human behaviour, of xenophobia and ignorance, without being unrealistically misanthropic. SPOILER ALERT though. Don't read Devine's article before you go to see the film. And let's face it, irrespective of Cameron's infantile and simplistic hippie politics, it's a film that is possibly going to revolutionise cinema and should be seen. Though, as she notes, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel did knock Avatar from the number one possie in the UK after one week.

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